Media: baradari myopia

By Richard North - June 22, 2025

With the Iranian conflict cooking nicely, now in its ninth day with reports of direct US involvement, I must nevertheless return to the second of my “variances” – the Casey report on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Iran can wait for a day.

One of the things that put me at odds with the Casey report, and the media treatment of it was the insistence that the so-called “grooming” gang issue was primarily one associated with “Asian” communities, narrowed down to encompass the generic “Pakistanis”, whereas I was writing that this was an issue related mainly to Kashmiri communities and, in particular, those from the Mirpur district.

The lack of nuance, if that is what it is, is all the more marked when the English language India Today, a week before the Casey Report, published an article headed: “From Mirpur to Manchester: How Pakistan’s honour culture fuelled Britain’s grooming gang crisis”.

Although the headline reference was to Pakistan (alongside Mirpur), the text of the article made it very clear that this was a Mirpur Kashmiri issue. Understanding how the “systematic abuse” became rooted in the British diaspora community requires, the article says, “examining its cultural origins in Mirpur, a city from which the majority of British-Pakistanis trace their ancestry”.

Though technically part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, we are told, Mirpur’s inhabitants share the customs, language, and cultural attitudes of Pakistan’s Punjabi majority, creating a specific strain of South Asian patriarchy that would prove particularly toxic when transplanted to British soil.

But there are differences. Mirpur, the article asserts, represents a cultural ecosystem where Islamic fundamentalism intersects with primitive tribalism and violent misogyny. Within this worldview, women exist as male property, requiring constant supervision and control.

In this “ecosystem”, it is argued that the concept of female “honour” becomes central to family and community standing, with any perceived transgression potentially resulting in violence, social ostracism, or death. This creates psychological frameworks where women who fail to conform to strict behavioural codes are viewed not as individuals deserving respect, but as dishonoured entities available for exploitation.

This, of course, positions white women, and in particular white, working class teenagers, as legitimate targets for exploitation, this status being accentuated within Mirpuri-legacy communities. Yet, the best that Casey had to offer was a reference to a Home Office paper that grudgingly conceded that cultural characteristics of offender groups are not “irrelevant” and nor should they be ignored.

However, the Telegraph partially made up for the omissions with an article by Rakib Ehsan, headed: “These are not ‘Asian’ grooming gangs, they are Kashmiri Muslim”.

In his article, Ehsan referred to an academic paper exploring the incidence of group-based CSE which concluded that Pakistani and Muslim proportions of the local population are “powerful variables” in explaining the level of prosecutions in an area.

By contrast, the proportion of Bangladeshis and Indians in a local area had no effect. In fact, the proportion of Hindus in a local area had a negative impact on the levels of prosecutions. Therefore, using the term “Asian”, he asserted, was incredibly unhelpful in this context. Gujarati Hindus, Goan Catholics, and Punjabi Sikhs should not be conflated with the men perpetrating these crimes.

Without explaining why, though, Ehsan want on to declare that it was “time for us to shine a light on the poorly integrated Muslim communities originating from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, which have formed patriarchal clans along kinship lines – known as “biraderi”.

As an aside, one of the problems with following up on these “kinship networks” is the variation in spelling. There are at least five common variants, which makes it easy to miss references when doing online searches. And it doesn’t help when Ehsan calls the groups “clans”, which they are not. The baradari groups are typified by close family relationships, no wider than cousins. Clans are much more broadly based.

Nevertheless, Ehsan does make the point that these Mirpuri grooming gangs have shown an ugly side of family solidarity, multi-generational cohesion and tight-knit community networks. This, he says, “is the dark underbelly of modern multicultural Britain.

The national inquiry announced by home secretary Cooper, he says, must examine how these cultural codes have enabled group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.

That’s as far as it goes, but it has been a lot further than the bulk of the media has been prepared to go, with the narrative still centred on generic “Pakistanis”. Yet there can be little excuse for this. In 2021, I was writing that the immigration issue in the northern towns (on which the “grooming” has been centred) was neither primarily Muslim nor Pakistani, but Kashmiri.

My source, incidentally, was an official government document published in 2009, headed: “The Pakistani Muslim Community in England: Understanding Muslim Ethnic Communities”. Of the make-up of the communities, it says:

Of the three South Asian communities, the Pakistani community is the most evenly spread across the UK, although it is still concentrated in particular areas – Lancashire, Yorkshire, West Midlands and Greater London. Greater London, as a whole has the largest Pakistani population, but at the local authority level Birmingham has the largest Pakistani population followed by Bradford and Kirklees. More than half of the Pakistani population growth since 1991 is accounted for by UK born Pakistanis. Currently Bradford has the largest proportion of its total population (15%) identifying themselves as of Pakistani origin in England.

Pakistanis encompass a number of distinct regional and linguistic groups including Pathans, Punjabis, Mirpuris, Sindhis and Balochis. There are no accurate figures available but it is estimated that 60 per cent of the Pakistani population is from the Mirpur District of Kashmir and settled mainly in Birmingham, Bradford, Oldham and surrounding towns. In London the community is more mixed.

I should repeat, there is really no excuse for using the generic “Pakistani” description, when the Mirpuri links are so well-known and recorded. And bearing in mind that the government report was published 16 years ago, its comments on what it calls the baradari system should surely have warranted a red flag. It says:

Recent commentary has suggested that the biradari system, which served rural Pakistani communities well, providing health, social and justice systems, is now unworkable in the UK because of state provision. The breakdown of the system has contributed to further generational separation as families try to maintain old systems by imposing insular codes of practice upon second and third generations. Coupled with a sense of alienation, sections of young people are finding it difficult to manage differing cultural practices.

However, respondents from outside London have suggested that the biradari system is going through a form of revival, and that its effects are most tangible in the area of politics. They also suggested that younger British born politicians are as likely as politicians of the older generation to exploit the influence of the biradari as a route and passport for mobilising block votes.

There is, of course, much, much more to it than “block votes”, and it is my contention that the baradari groups have morphed into Mafia-like crime syndicates, on which group-based CSE is but one activity.

Taking us a little further, however, is Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times who writes a piece headed: “The missing link in the grooming gangs report: cousin marriage”.

This too is about baradari but, unfortunately, like Ehsan, Syed mistakenly elides these kinship groups with clans, which they are not. Clans will usually allow marriage outside the group, while baradari will not.

That’s where the cousins come in: consanguinity is a defining feature of the group, keeping the wealth, power and influence within the family, which spans the host and home country, the latter providing the never-ending supply of new brides.

Syed then writes of Casey missing the point about marriage practices that isolate communities, citing academic Patrick Nash of the Pharos Foundation who has written of baradari life “concentrated in small geographical areas spread across a few streets or nearby neighbourhoods where there is little need or opportunity to have much to do with wider society or practise the English language”.

To write a report on failures of integration without seeing the link with cousin marriage is, Syed suggests, “like writing on the power grid without noting the significance of electricity”.

Says Syed, Casey’s report on the rape gang scandal was flawed for the same reason. It was a strange experience to read her words as she edged ever closer to grasping the point without quite getting there. She noted that the problem is disproportionately concentrated among British Pakistanis.

She even noted that “two thirds of suspects offended within groups” that were “based on pre-existing relationships — mainly brothers and cousins”. But then, stunningly, she suggested that these links were “unsophisticated” and “informal”.

Anyone who studies these things, he says, could have told her that this is the unmistakable pattern of clan-based crime: groups whose links are anything but informal and unsophisticated.

Forget “clan” – think baradari, the core of which is cousin marriage. This sustains close-kin networks which incentivise members both to dehumanise out-group victims and to suppress knowledge of criminal activity to preserve family honour.

What Syed does not do, though, is think outside the box. To keep the focus on CSE is also missing the point. This is but one criminal activity amongst many, in cross-border communities where drug trafficking is rife and money laundering a way of life.

Such is the scale of the problem that we need much better understanding, which requires us to speed up the learning curve. Sadly, it does not look as if this is going to happen with the help of our media.